Recently in The Same Thing Category

April 09, 2014

Reform critics dismiss efforts to rethink leadership practice, recruitment, and training as an effort to import "business" thinking into K-12. Meanwhile, it's easy for reformers to sound as if they're just saying we need "better" school and system leaders. In reality, today's leaders struggle with professional norms, training, and circumstances that aren't of their making--and which offer precious little calculated to help forge great schools and systems.

May 13, 2013

I finally joined Twitter the other day. (I'm at "rickhess99," if you care.) I haven't yet actually penned any tweets, and don't know that I will. But I thought I'd practice my tweeting a bit (just in case), by taking a crack at boiling down last week's familiar back-and-forth debate over "is it sch...

December 16, 2010

Note: Over the next few weeks, I'll occasionally be flagging nuggets from my new book, The Same Thing Over and Over, just out from Harvard University Press. For more, check out the book on Amazon.
With NCLB's goal of 100% proficiency by 2014 having crashed and burned, we've settled upon a grand new...

December 06, 2010

Note: Over the next few weeks, I'll occasionally be flagging nuggets from my new book, The Same Thing Over and Over, just out from Harvard University Press. For more, check out the book on Amazon.
Teacher unions insist that it would be something akin to the end of Western Civilization should we ve...

November 30, 2010

Albert Einstein reportedly once said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." As I note in my new book, The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday's Ideas, apocryphal or not, this line is a devastating a...